Which
of these has the highest population – Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia
or Mexico City? You guessed it, Mexico City, with a population about
22 million and growing daily. Almost certainly the world’s largest
city, it is also a gigantic ecological disaster area. And a laboratory-pure
example of how only socialist solutions can deal with the environmental
nightmare.

Mexico
DF (Distrito Federal) suffers from the following key problems, although
this is far from a comprehensive summary.

Because
of rural poverty, the DF is growing exponentially. Thousands move
there every day. This is one case where we can justly speak of
‘overpopulation’. How this causes environmental damage is dealt
with below.

Although
at an altitude of 7000 feet, the City is on a giant plateau surrounded
by mountains – topologically this is like a bowl. The pollution
from traffic and factories is captured in the bowl by ‘thermal
inversion’ and cannot escape.

The
water table is sinking, the aquifers beneath the city are being
emptied, and a huge water crisis is looming. Further,
the drainage system is antiquated and collapsing, leading to flooding
and drains overflowing in the rainy season. For a few months every
year the water system is polluted by sewage.

Overpopulated
megacity

Why do
these armies of campesinos abandon the land and come to the cities?
Neoliberalism, especially the land (counter) reform by the Salinas
government in the late 1980s and the signing of the NAFTA free trade
agreement in 1994, have opened up Mexican agriculture to US-dominated
agribusiness as never before. Whether the agribusiness companies actually
own the land is largely irrelevant. Even progressive peasant co-operatives
are dictated to by world market prices. This results in the ruination
of the peasantry, and mass unemployment (or only very partial employment)
among agricultural labourers.

None
of the poor expect a life of luxury in the DF. But being
a street peddler, joining the 800,000 or so ’ambulantes’ (street traders),
partacipating in urban crime or even being a beggar offers a route
out of starvation. You might get two meals a day and your kids might
go to school. If you’re extremely lucky you might get a factory job
and earn the fantastic sum of US$70 a week. In any case, it won’t
be worse than the rural choice of unemployment or backbreaking endless
work for almost nothing.

How does
the vast influx of the rural poor damage the environment? Most people
arriving in the city build their own primitive houses on the hills,
either in exiting barrios, or in new areas, which quickly attract
more migrants and become new barrios in their own right.New barrios have no water, drainage, electricity or other services.
Human waste collects in makeshift pools and ditches which outside
the rainy season is baked into a soft dust which is then blown by
the wind over the whole city.

An inspection
by the DF city government found that nearly all the food on outdoor
food stalls contained traces of human faeces. More than 80% of Mexicans
eat at an outdoor food stall at least once a day; part of the reason
for that is that the poor often have no cooking facilities in their
homes. The rich would never dream of eating at a food stall, the poor
literally eat shit.

As the
space around the city becomes ever more tightly crowded, the newcomers
have more and more encroached on the ecological protection zones.
Some of these zones are close to the aquifers: result – another mechanism
for sewage to get into the water supply.

The PRD
city government in the late 1990s adopted a ‘get tough’ attitude to
these new encampments – utilising impeccable environmental arguments.
They sent the riot police (grenaderos) to forcibly remove them. This
resulted in early morning raids, savage beatings, the police destroying
the flimsy shacks and stealing any money or valuable possessions that
the newcomers had. Human misery heaped on human misery, as any solution
within the present system resulted in a bad choice.

Sinking
city

Because
of the emptying of the aquifers the whole city is sinking. This is
taking place at alarming rates. Subsidence is a threat to buildings
in may parts of the city (a human made addition to the threat posed
by earthquakes and the nearby volcano, Popocatepetl). According to
the Mexico Valley Water Authority the net subsidence has been an incredible
7.5 metres since 1900. Several lakes have been formed in areas where
the ground has dipped due to water pumping, and these lakes are widening.

Estimates
of the amount of water left in the two main subterranean aquifers
differ; most agree the total amount is around 200 times the annual
water needs of the city. But it would be foolish to imagine that the
water can last 200 years. Such calculations leave out the rate of
increase of water usage as more people arrive; it also leaves out
of account whether the subsidence will make whole areas of the city
uninhabitable if the inflow of people is not stemmed.

Without
question Mexico City is overcrowded.It should be a conscious part of any socialist policy to stop
the inflow of people – how, we come to later. This is not saying that its population growth
in and of itself which causes poverty; it is merely saying for one
fifth of the population of a vast country to attempt to live in the
same city is totally irrational and causes environmental breakdown.

One aspect
of it, which we won’t dwell on too long, is the Gran Canal del Desague
(grand drainage canal) which snakes out past the huge barrio of Indios
Verde in the north of the city. Vast amounts of the city’s sewage
go out through this canal. At various points on the edge of the city
and outside, municipal and water authority workers try to clear the
water of large objects – but they always call the police for human
body parts. Then the so-called ‘black water’ heads on out of the city,
much of it to be eventually used for agricultural irrigation. That’s
one of the reasons why the wonderful fruit and vegetables available
in the street markets have to be soaked in disinfected water before
they can be eaten. Such a vast city consumes too much water and produces
too much sewage. And we haven’t even talked about pollution yet.

Smog
in the bowl ; ‘hoy no circular’!

Natural
conditions have produced the phenomenon of thermal inversion, in which
cold air from the mountains sits as a layer on top of the warm air
below, reversing the normal mechanism where war air rises to the top.
The result is that the city’s notorious pollution is unable to escape;
warm sunshine often produces a petrochemical smog.

While
this phenomenon is frequently blamed on the traffic, its main cause
is the unregulated factories on the edge of the city. To even begin
to address this question, it means taking harsh measures to reduce
or eliminate these emissions. The PRD government of the city has never
had the bottle to take on the employers on this issue. Regulating
traffic, or appearing to, is easier.

One of
the PRD-introduced schemes was ‘hoy no circular’. All vehicles are
not allowed onto the roads for one day a week, according to the colour
of their number plates. This has almost nil effect, because a) All
rich families have several cars – one or two for the parents and a
couple for the kids (who stay at home till 30 and beyond). So they
just rotate their cars. This is especially important when you realise
that what appears to be a traffic-infested city is one where only
the 500,000 richest people have cars. b) Those people who just defy
this weeks ‘no circular’ day can generally afford to bribe the cops
if they get caught c) The ban doesn’t affect the hundreds of antiquated
buses and lorries belching out black smoke from leaded petrol.

In short
there is nothing effective being done to reduce the level of pollution.
It’s only on weekends when the number of cars out dips drastically
and factories aren’t working when the level of pollution notably falls.

Solutions

OK, Mexico
City is a pretty polluted place, but what’s
the big deal? For people who view the situation with equanimity I
suggest a simple test: visit the outpatient department of a major
public hospital and see the pitiful sight of dozens of poor young
children with cancer, deformities and other diseases caused by poverty
and the degradation of the environment. Mexico City demonstrates again
that environmental destruction has a class bias. The rich areas of
Las Lomas and La Bosque are much more pollution free, and anyway the
rich can always escape to their luxurious (and heavily guarded) weekend
houses in the countryside and by the sea.

The central
cause of Mexico City’s crisis is rural poverty. Without justice for
the campesinos, without making it possible to live and work in the
countryside with a minimum degree of human dignity and with basic
needs met, the flow into the city will continue. This is a task of
revolutionary proportions. It would mean national state support for
peasant collectives – support in terms of a minimum price for their
products, irrespective of the diktats of the world market. That is
impossible within the framework of the North America Free Trade Area
(NAFTA) and banned by the WTO. To attempt to do this would mean a
major political confrontation with the United States, let alone the
Mexican ruling class.

To stem
the human tide of misery towards the DF, means making it just liveable
to stay in the countryside, but positively a more attractive
a proposition than the upheaval of moving.

It is
not just a question of those who will move to the city in the future;
it is a question of too many people living there now. There is no
rational solution to this other than creating positive incentives
for people to move out. Naturally this does not exclude the
fight for decent conditions and decent housing within the city now.
Saying the city is overpopulated is not a piece of underhand Malthusianism;
it is just recording the fact that a certain area of territory can
only support, at our present level of technology, a limited number
of human beings.

The megacity
problem is not at all unique to Mexico City. Karachi, Jakarta, Sao
Paolo and a host of other cities, mainly in the third world, suffer
the same problems. Talking about reducing the population of megacities
could cause images of the Khmer Rouge emptying Phnom Penh at bayonet
point to appear in the minds of some people. Isn’t this kind of ‘social
engineering’ dangerous, even a return to Stalinism? Not at all. Naturally
it should be entirely on a voluntary basis, and could only happen
if conditions outside the megacities were as good as, or better than,
those inside them.

But socialist
answers to environmental questions must involve, in dozens of countries,
an attempt to reorder the skewed relationship between the cities
and the countryside, and the fantastic overcentralisation of many
states. In Mexico nothing of much importance from a cultural or business
point of view happens outside the DF. That’s an irrationality which
is repeated all over the world.

If the
DF suffers from some acute natural disadvantages in regard to air
pollution, this can only mean draconian, dictatorial measures against
its perpetrators. Since the main ones are part of the Mexican bourgeoisie,
this is almost impossible outside of dramatic transformation of the
relationship of social relations – topped off at the level of state
power.

Over
time the DF may become uninhabitable anyway, if the sinking of the
Mexico Valley continues. That kind of thing has happened before in
human history, and it can happen again, whatever the social system.
To make it habitable for the foreseeable future means making the
whole of Mexico more habitable. That means defeating the the narco-saturated
bourgeoisie and their sponsors to the north. Environmental crisis
means socialist solutions. Let me put it this way: what other solutions
could there possibly be?

*Phil Hearse is the editor of Marxsite

To
read in detail about the political background and social crisis
in Mexico, see Mexico's Hope by James D. Cockcroft, Monthly Review
Press. This is the best recent book on the topic.

Mexico
was built on the site of the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlan,
one of the wonders of the world in the Middle Ages. See Diego
Rivera's amazing visualisation of it (note Frida Kahlo as Aztec
princess) by clicking here. See his
magisterial mural The World by clicking here.